Bill Reynolds: Cooley has brought the fun back to Friartown

Maybe itís time to give Ed Cooley and his Friars a little love.For he has made the Friars fun again. Tuesday night told us that with an exclamation point.

Maybe itís time to give Ed Cooley and his Friars a little love.

For he has made the Friars fun again.

Tuesday night told us that with an exclamation point.

There was a huge crowd on a snowy night at The Dunk. There was a wonderful double-overtime game, even if the Friars lost. There was another great night of college basketball in a city thatís seen so many great nights of college basketball through the years.

This shouldnít be taken for granted.

Not for a school that hasnít been to the NCAA Tournament in a decade, and hasnít won a game in it since 1997. Not for a school whose basketball program seemed played out a few years ago, ground down by too much losing and the growing perception that the league was simply too difficult for them.

And this has come at the tail end of a season thatís not been the easiest for either Cooley or the Friars. Itís a season thatís seen the very talented Kris Dunn unable to play for most of the year due to a shoulder injury. And itís been a season where the two freshmen recruits were suspended from the team for a well-publicized campus incident. (One has left school.)

In short, itís a season that easily could have been a lost year.

That itís not, that itís a season that still has a chance to end up in the NCAA Tournament, is like some unexpected gift from the basketball gods.

Cooley always has been a great story, of course, the inner-city kid who grew up one of nine children to a woman on welfare and a father not in his life; grew up without any good clothes and without any money, in a world where he would eat cereal with no milk. Back when the idea of one day being the Providence College coach was as far away as the heavens; the kid from Central High School who grew up to become the first African-American coach of the Friars.

But this is more than that.

Being the Friarsí coach is not the easiest of jobs. The past decade has told us that. But from the time he walked in here Cooley was different, and it transcended both his race and the fact he grew up close enough to walk to The Dunk. He was different because he knew the history. He was different because this was his dream job, not some steppingstone to somewhere else.

I remember one night in December 2006.

He was the coach of Fairfield then, at the Dunk to play the Friars, and he was standing in a corridor outside the visiting team locker room,

ďThis is very exciting to me,Ē he said. ďI grew up a Friar fan. I used to come to games as a kid. Then I would walk home to Wiggins Village.Ē

Could you make this up?

Not then you couldnít.

Nor could you make up the fact that just four years later he would be back as the new Friarsí coach.

But from the beginning, Cooley has brought both energy and positive energy to this job, always has operated as though he believes he can truly turn this into a national program. He never talks about any possible limitations, never talks about any of the perceived negatives that have hovered over this program like a deep 3-point shot since the Big East began in 1979.

That has been one of his gifts to this program, this sense that his vision is the same as the fanís vision. In that sense, heís similar to Rick Pitino, who at his introductory press conference told Friar fans to dream about cutting down the nets, even if everyone thought he was crazy at the time. From the beginning, Cooley has believed in this program, believed in its future. From the beginning, he has stamped this program with the imprint of both his big personality and his vision of its potential.

There was Cooley in his gray suit and pink tie Tuesday night against Villanova. There he was throwing his arms up, trying to pump up the crowd. There he was on the sideline, animated, the emotion all over his face. There he was, living and dying in the closing minutes, trying to get his team to the finish like some jockey on board a tired horse.

And there he was afterwards in the interview room, all the emotion gone, saying that it had been the best atmosphere he had ever seen at The Dunk, saying all the right things. Then he posed for pictures with some little kids, gracious to the end. For it had been a long emotional night in a season that is coping to the stretch, the Friars on the NCAA bubble, college basketball crunch time.

And if at the end of the night the Friars fell just a little short, it had been a great college basketball game, and a great basketball night before a great crowd.

Thatís what Cooley already has given us in just his third season here. He has given us both energy and passion, and a belief that this program is poised for another great act in this long-running basketball story, one that began way back in the late í50s and continues to this day. More important, he has shown that he is the right man for this job, another in a long list of PC coaches who were perfect for their time and place.